Thursday, January 11, 2018

The reason trust is so important to branding is that you don't want to think about it.

What really great brands know is that customers will seek them out. Will beat a path to their doors.

Because all we want, really, is for our problem to be solved as quickly and reliably as possible.

Here are three quick examples from my own life.

Yesterday I got an enormous migraine.

Not a little migraine. Not a headache where you take an aspirin and put your head down and it's better after half an hour.

We're talking all-day, all-in, all-consuming migraine.

And at the first sight of the problem -- literally, first sight, because I see "floaters" before one of these comes on -- I ran to CVS (not my preferred brand of drugstore, but the ubiquitous one around here) and further sprinted to the "pain relief" section and grabbed a big bottle of Excedrin Migraine.

I trust that Excedrin will kill the headache.

And even though it didn't work all that well yesterday, because the headache was so bad that an over-the-counter solution wasn't sufficient, you can be sure that I carry a bottle of the stuff in my bag. Because it's my shortcut; I trust it more than whatever else is available.

In Israel, when my daughter was getting her hair done before getting married, the hairdresser turned to me with pity. "Are you going to get rid of the gray, or what?"

Off I ran to "Super-Pharm," which again I don't necessarily trust but which had its signs in English, and grabbed a package of L'Oreal off the shelf.

Half of the top of my head is now a weird shade of raspberry. But I knew, and I know today, that anywhere I go, L'Oreal can be trusted not to burn my scalp off.

This is worth quite a bit when facing a hairdye crisis in a foreign land!

Here's another brand that I trust -- Amazon.

I know that if there is ever any problem with an order, Amazon will do whatever it takes.

They are there, day or night, to make the issue right.

And they sell me stuff, not only from one vendor, and not only one kind of thing, from all over the world.

None of the brands I trust are perfect.

None of them are flawless.

But all the brands I use, and trust beyond any other, are there when I need to get a specific task done.

It's a lesson not only for business owners, but for individuals as employees.

What does the boss need to get done? Are you there to handle it, without fuss or complaint? With skill?

That, more than anything else, and without unnecessary complexity, is what a person should think of, when they think about techniques for achieving brand success.__________

Posted January 11, 2018 by Dr. Dannielle Blumenthal. All opinions are the author's own. This post is hereby released into the public domain. CC0 Creative Commons photo by Free-Photos via Pixabay.